This bed holds all our love
Only recently1 has the bed become a symbol of a relationship status. Are you alone in your bed? Do you have a partner to fill it, maybe even someone you’ve committed enough to declare as a life-long spouse?
From a full bed to now basking in a king, my bed has been an “our” bed for 8 years, shared with my husband. This bed has held our sleeping hours, our sleepless hours, and our love.
And now, it holds our child.
I did not, like so many other brave women, immediately make the decision to bed share2. Instead, I bought the bedside bassinet, a safe in-between while I delayed the decision. Would we do it? Would we commit to bed sharing or would we sleep train? Was there a magical third option where my kid might just sleep and it wouldn’t matter where I put his body?
For us, the answer to that last question ended up being big fat no. My kid would definitely care.
As any new parent will tell you, right around 3 or 4 months your baby decides to have some opinions about sleep. They may wake up more frequently, want to eat more at night, cry more and louder. For my husband and I, our little one felt like someone had flipped his internal system from easy mode to hard, testing all our few-months-old parenting skills.
In the end, we turned to the bed. Our bed. In the place where we had decidedly called “ours”, we had to make space for the new “him”. A third, out of sleep necessity.
Funnily enough, the first time our son joined our bed, we weren’t even at our own house. We were staying at my in-law’s in a full bed in their guest room. One night of intense lack of sleep led to a shift in the game plan for the following night: my husband moved himself to the pull-out couch in another room while my little love and I stretched out.
I can recount the nights from that moment on where we went back and forth - do we fight to keep him in his crib or do we choose sleep and put him in the bed with us? Many nights of sleep-deprived decisions, unsure if we were making the right moves, but in the moment not caring because sleep was on the other side of bed-sharing.
It was as if the bed, our symbol of marriage and unity, was interrupted.
Now we had to tip-toe around our sleeping baby in the bed. Don’t make too much noise going to the bathroom in the middle of the night. We even halted our years long discipline of praying together at night, because now there was a little one who might wake up at the sound of our voices.
All the while, a little voice whispered in the back of our minds, would our bed ever be our own again? Then the question started to shift. Did it even matter?
Slowly (I cannot emphasize enough the word slowly) our bed morphed into something else. The bed now held our blossoming family unit. It restored us every evening with comfort, with sleep, with a reprieve from so many sleepless nights. It changed in literal size because anyone who bed shares will tell you a king makes all the difference. But it also changed in meaning.
Bed sharing became less of an interruption and more like a reflection of our familial love.
Picture taken by Simon Berger, downloaded from Unsplash
After a move, a birthday, and weaning, my son started sleeping more and more in his own bed. But still now at 2.5, there are many nights or early mornings when I hear the yell from across the hall, “Mama! Mama!” and feel my feet on the floor before I’ve opened my eyes.
I see his arms reaching up with the small bit of ambient street light as my arms reach down and around his body to pick him up. I switch off the sound machine, and grab his water cup, a rehearsed set of motions. We shuffle quickly down the small hall, and flop into bed, his body already in position to snuggle into mine.
It doesn’t usually take long before his quick breaths even out to longer and steadier strides. I rest my head on the pillow, his still baby-soft hair tickling my chin and nose. Two more minutes and I join him in sleep, quicker than when I try to sleep on my own.
When my husband and I wake up now, it is not to alarms blaring as they used to pre-kid, but to a little chatty voice that starts even before he opens his eyes. He seems to be in the middle of some thought or dream and says some random sentence about Blippi or dinosaurs. Or sometimes it’s with a roaring, “Wake up mama!”
And with that, the day has started.
My husband stirs and launches himself up and off to the bathroom, the toddler trying to follow and chatting all the way while I burry my head back under the blanket to gain as much rest as I can. Soon enough I will switch out with my husband while he gets ready for work. Our love knows our roles and we try to serve the other well.
But on rare mornings, my son wakes up quiet as I feel his snuggly arms reach around me, his little head finds my chest to rest. As I lay there I get the gift of this slow moment to bask in how lucky I am.
This bed holds all of our love. All my life lies here, safe and together.
This bed, this love, is ours.
This post is part of a blog hop with Exhale—an online community of women pursuing creativity alongside motherhood, led by the writing team behind Coffee + Crumbs. Click here to view the next post in the series "Ours".
If you feel comfortable, please share in the comments your own bed sharing experience! I have been surprised at how often other parents have the same experiences but are too nervous to share due to stigmas against bed sharing.
How has sharing your bed shaped your parenting experience?
Thank you for sharing!! I have special memories with bed sharing our youngest for a few months!